Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “So it’s really just a question of … taste, right? It’s just unattractive when people with money piss on poor people and tell themselves they’re acting out of principle.”

  “I can’t stand disingenuous rich people whining about high taxes,” Ben says. “Or like when that right-wing ex-junkie on TV, the columnist, what’s her name, the heiress who led the demonstration to stop clean-needle exchanges.”

  “Molly Cramer. I agree: it’s ugly.”

  Ben lifts off his chair for an instant and bellows, “Noooo! No, you’ve got it backward, George: that is wrong. It’s wrong. It’s ugly because it’s wrong.”

  George says nothing for a few seconds. He drinks his Pellegrino. “If there’s a depression I guess we’ll all care about politics again, won’t we? Depression or repression. Or real U.S. intervention in Mexico.”

  “Which you’ll be happy to support ‘under certain circumstances.’ Just like liberals in 1964 with Vietnam. Hey! That’s what you are—not a paleoliberal, not a neoliberal. You and I are fucking retroliberals. Swank City liberals.”

  Ben, knowing he’s won the round, settles down and leans toward George. “Just because nobody but me and people in the District and a few nuts give a shit about politics right now doesn’t mean your beliefs aren’t real beliefs. It isn’t all ‘taste.’ You’re still more offended by Molly Cramer than you are by, by … some ugly zoom shot or something, aren’t you? Or polyester?”

  “Yes. I am. Absolutely.” For the first time all night George smiles and means it. “Although zoom shots are hip again. So’s polyester. Get it straight, man.”

  Ben puts his feet up on the giant wooden coffee table and tips back in his chair, which is a kind of thickly upholstered burgundy throne. “That’s why Americans love the market. The rules are clear. And we believe in the rules. And it’s exciting, like sports! Everything else is fuzzy. Marriage, sex, religion, art, politics, all that.” He glances at the computer screen, where the time, 12:12, is flashing. “Seminar’s over. London opens in twenty minutes. A couple of the biotechs are still going crazy from that ‘mental modem’ horseshit last week.”

  “It was fun,” George says, and gets up to leave.

  “Whoa!”

  George turns. Ben is scrolling through the Reuters wire. “What?”

  “You see what your network did after the close tonight? Announced a new issue. Twenty-five million ME shares! What does Mose need a billion dollars for?” Ben turns from his computer to face George. This seems not to be a rhetorical question.

  “Let me go call Harold right now and ask.” He puts his hand to his forehead in a salute. “Good night, Benny.”

  “I smell roll-up!”

  “Okay,” George says, opening the door, his desire for bed overriding the impulse to ask Ben what he’s talking about. “I’ll see you.”

  Getting from the rooms to the elevators in big-deal Las Vegas and Disney World hotels is inevitably depressing, since in the hallways all expense is spared on the theming. The fantasy bubble is burst. It’s like seeing a nightclub in the daytime, without even the redeeming stench of ashtrays and perfume and day-old booze.

  “Hey! Where’d you go?”

  It’s Shawna. He sees she really is sexy, in the thin-lipped, do-a-little-crank fashion of the prettiest checkout girl at the Safeway. Maybe she is a stalker. Maybe she’s about to pull out a razor blade from between her breasts, and with an unearthly animal cry bare her dripping vampiric fangs. He pushes the down button. She is too close.

  “I went to get some air,” George says. “With a friend.”

  “So, like, I’ve got rubbers.” Of course you do, because you have AIDS; the prospective details—rubbers!—haven’t even occurred to him. “And like I said before, you can do, you know, totally whatever you want to do to me.” She smiles her quick, guileless, automatic American smile. “Come on, we’ll have a blast.”

  No, not a razor blade, not fangs. She’s more android than beast.

  “I’ll pass,” he says.

  “Okay. Cool. Hey, one piece of advice?”

  Don’t stick your arm down a woman’s shirt if you don’t intend to have sex with her? That’s very astute advice, Shawna.

  “What?” he says.

  “You’ve got to go see the Mandalay Bay. The Sea of Predators has real crocodiles and sharks. It’s just exactly like a fairy tale my daddy used to tell me.”

  The elevator door opens and he lets her on first.

  “A gentleman!”

  George finds himself chuckling uncontrollably.

  “What?” Shawna says, wanting in on the joke.

  “Nothing. It’s—I’ve had a long day.”

  She reaches between her breasts and pulls out a necklace strung with tiny plastic luggage tags. She snaps one off.

  “This is my card.”

  SHAWNA CINDY SWITZER, ACTRESS is ink-jetted in cursive letters.

  “Now,” she says as they reach the lobby, “if you ever have any parts you think would be right for me, call. Okay? Or if you just want to, you know, talk.” George is now almost entirely sober, but it’s impossible for him to tell if by “talk” she means have the dirtiest sex imaginable, or talk.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Nighty-night.”

  As she walks out into the lobby, cheerful as a coed in a Mentos commercial, George, destupefied, presses the button for his floor. So, like, I’ve got rubbers! He has never in his life worn a condom, never even touched one. In this, as he once argued during a Newsweek story meeting, he’s part of a singular baby-boom subcategory of the condom-innocent—heterosexuals whose promiscuous years occurred during the decade and a half after the Pill, before herpes and AIDS. Non-marital intercourse without condoms, George thinks as he switches off the light and the TV and falls into the crisp and frigid hotel sheets: another dying twentieth-century art, like operating a television manually, and reading (and sniffing!) those damp paper copies with the purplish type they had in grade school. The sixth grade, maybe seventh, was the last time he had been in a conversation about rubbers, using that word. So, like, I’ve got rubbers. And you can do, you know, whatever you want to me. Totally whatever. The to in “to me” was, of course, the most acutely pornographic bit of a remarkable pornographic performance—the carte blanche invitation to enter some dark free-fire zone, achieving maximum erotic power in its unconsummated ambiguity.

  The phone rings. Christ, maybe she got his room number.

  “Hallo. May I help you?” he answers slowly, in a badly faked English accent.

  It’s Lizzie, speaking softly. “I’m calling George Mactier. Is this room 4063?”

  “Hi. It’s me, sweetie. I, I—”

  “What’s wrong, George? Why the funny voice?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine. I just thought you might be this insane actress. She wants a part in the show. But, anyway, why are you awake? Is everything okay? You weren’t home when I called earlier.”

  “No, I know.” She’s walking around their bedroom, cordless phone in hand. “I just wanted to hear your voice. I can’t sleep.”

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.” She pauses. “George?” she says a little plaintively.

  “Yeah?” He is so happy to be talking to her. He is so happy she’s about to admit that she’s been advising Mose behind his back. It’s cute, in fact, how difficult this is for her. “What is it, sweetie?”

  “Microsoft offered five-point-five million for fifteen percent.”

  “Ben told me. That’s good. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. But now they want warrants to buy almost half the company.”

  “Right.” She’s not going to mention Mose.

  “I don’t think I want to do it. I think I want to tell them no. Is that okay?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I don’t know. A little because of Virtual Fortress. Five million isn’t enough money to make me forget I wanted them all dead three years ago.” Virtual Fortress is the company Microsoft crushed shortly af
ter Lizzie signed on to run it. “And if I ever end up joining their fucking cult, or anybody’s, I really want to join it, not become an auxiliary member with their cult spies looking over my shoulder.”

  “You think it’ll piss them off? Turning them down?”

  “Maybe. A little, for a little while. But I’m tiny. And sustained anger is too irrational for those guys. And you always say that when you tell people no, they end up wanting you all the more.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “I know,” Lizzie says, pacing. “I know it.” A mile south of her in the Buttermilk Channel off Governors Island, the foghorn blasts its long, slow, old oboe wail. Hearing that sound is one of the things they like about the Seaport. They also like that their neighborhood isn’t much of a neighborhood at all, that living at the Seaport doesn’t mean much of anything to the world, as living in SoHo or the Upper East Side or Brooklyn does. “Did you hear the foghorn?”

  “Uh-uh. Lizzie, why don’t you ever touch my, you know, hand? My left arm?”

  “What do you mean, George? I do. What do you mean?”

  “I mean in an affectionate way. Or when we’re making love. It was just a thought I had. Like it’s a part of me you consider off-limits or—”

  “No. No.”

  “—or something. I don’t know. I miss you. I guess I’m horny.”

  She sits on the edge of their bed. “Come home.”

  “I’ll get there late, eleven something. I’m going from MBC to the hospital to see your dad and straight to the airport.”

  “A reporter from Time called. About Daddy. I haven’t returned the call yet.” Johnny hops onto the bed and, arching his back, presses himself against her naked hip, rubbing hard against her. Lizzie pushes the cat away.

  “I told Newsweek no this afternoon. We can’t talk to Time if we aren’t talking to Newsweek. So, tell the Time guy we want to keep it private.” He thinks. “Tell him your father’s condition could be jeopardized if there’s too much fuss.”

  “It’s a her. You want me to lie?” The cat returns for more insistent Lizzie-rubbing, and she tosses him off the bed. She thinks of Buster Grinspoon’s experiments: she would pay for a device that makes it possible to tell Johnny she likes him and will pet him later, but she finds his pressing and purring creepy now, because it’s three in the morning and she is naked. She wonders if there are livestock applications for Grinspoon’s technology. Letting milk cows and dairy farmers negotiate optimal milking times. Or linking the jockey and his thoroughbred. Or persuading beef cattle that this dark chute doesn’t really lead to stun guns and blood-speckled saws but to a fresh pond and sunny drifts of clover.

  “It may not be a lie,” George says.

  “Maybe. Oh—I talked to your friend Hank Saddler this afternoon.”

  At last, George thinks. He hates feeling suspicious. Maybe telling him about Mose just slipped her mind, with everything that’s going on.

  “Saddler,” Lizzie says, “asked me to let the Army use ShowNet. To keep track of Mexican rebels or something. He was awful. I told him no.”

  George says nothing for a couple of seconds. “Okay.”

  “You’re not angry, are you? I don’t think Saddler or Mose or anybody will be pissed at you because your crazy wife’s not a team player. Will they?”

  “No. No. I don’t care,” George says, leaving just a bit of chilling space between sentences. “Thanks for letting me know about it.” Why isn’t she telling him about Mose? He thinks, but doesn’t believe: I should’ve fucked Shawna Cindy Switzer.

  “I can’t wait to see you,” she says, in the oversincere voice she uses when she’s trying hard to reassure him. The effect is nearly always the opposite.

  “Me too,” George replies. “Bye.”

  “I love you,” Lizzie says.

  “Okay. Thanks,” George says. “Tell the kids I love them.” Mimeographs, fruity-smelling bruise-colored mimeographs, the grade-school artifacts he couldn’t remember earlier.

  “Have a safe trip.”

  As he hangs up, he notices the red light blinking. The message, he learns, is a return call from “the office of Michael Milken.” Not Milken, but his office, and calling, according to the female assistant with the standard Sunbelt playmate voice, “on Tuesday afternoon, from Pingxiang, in Jiangxi province in the People’s Republic.” What on earth, George tries not to wonder as he closes his eyes, does Milken want?

  12

  Waking up alone, without a partner’s scrutiny, means waking up more slowly. At least for Lizzie it does. It’s as if her senses are on a rheostat instead of the regular on-off toggle. Not that George ever tries to make her feel lazy as she lies on her side some mornings for ten or fifteen minutes, watching the three rhombuses of sunlight brighten on the bedroom’s one mottled old plaster wall and creep downward, listening to the racket of the last of the fish men tossing their iron tools and empty crates back into their trucks and gassing away. But her awareness of his awareness of her lying there awake makes her feel like a neurasthenic Pacific Palisades housewife, some pretty slug.

  Now out of bed, fully awake, going barefoot as usual from bathroom to computer to closet to kitchen, but not needing to wait to let George finish at the sink, not needing to pivot an unconscious inch as he passes by to pee, performing the morning ablutions ballet all by herself, she feels loneliness drifting in. Yeesh, she thinks, looking at the pillow creases on one cheek and red filigree in her eyes: at thirty-five she simply no longer has the facial resilience to drink three quarters of a bottle of wine and sleep for only six hours. Does George ever look at his morning-after face, she wonders, and indulge in this kind of penny-ante self-hatred? Vanity will make her drink less, just as vanity, rather than the prospect of lung cancer and emphysema, has made her quit smoking cigarettes. Quit buying cigarettes.

  When she returns, topless, to the bedroom, she is surprised to find Max sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring straight ahead as if meditating. He’s wearing a small black backpack with some kind of red snorkel sticking out of it, and twisting a knob on a little black box. On the backpack is a stitched-fabric DuPont logo, and on the black control unit a hand-painted label that says SS. Max is not meditating.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello, Sir,” she says. “Contacting your alien friends?” She grabs one of George’s dirty T-shirts and pulls it over her nakedness.

  “I’m recording indoor-pollution data. For Science and Society. I’ve got to do it in three different places for three days. We live in a dense fog of dust and skin cells and toxins and smoke, but don’t realize.”

  For an instant, Lizzie actually thinks he has recited a haiku. Max got an A in creative writing last quarter, which was Haiku and Limerick; this quarter it’s Imaginary Autobiography. “After you’re done recording indoor-pollution data you’re going to have about two minutes to eat breakfast.”

  “I already microwaved Eggos for LuLu and I. The toaster broke.” “LuLu and me. Rafaela’s not here?”

  “No. She’s scared of the microwave, anyhow. Oh, Mom, last night I deleted one of your e-mails accidentally. From someone named Fanny at fuck-dot-com or something.” Max is delighted with the opportunitty to say fuck to his mother.

  “What were you doing in my e-mail?” It must have been from Fanny Taft, the girl from Minnesota who wants a summer internship.

  “It was by accident! You had your password loaded in and I logged on without realizing it was your Fine-Technologies-dot-com account and then I thought the e-mail was some pornographic spam, so I deleted it without reading it. Sorry. I also deleted an e-mail about OSHI Gas Wars or something—”

  “Max! Jesus!”

  “Don’t yell! I thought it was spam about some Nintendo 128 game.”

  The brownnosing this morning at the checkout desk in Las Vegas was extreme. “We’re all so glad you had a chance to visit the Venetian yourself, Mr. Mactier.” But George finds he no longer reviles this kind of American ultrahospitality—he plays along,
indifferent to whether it’s fake or real, since it’s always nicer. It’s like the permanent sunniness of Los Angeles. He understands in theory how it could get annoying and even slightly scary after a while, like a clown’s painted-on smile, as Lizzie says, but George has never felt the oppression. Rather, his emotions correlate with southern California weather in conventional ways: on gray, rainy days, like today, he feels cheated, as if the city has been deglamorized wholesale, its raison d’être washed away.

  Aside from the drizzle and colorless sky, he feels nauseated. “Under the weather”: hangovers generate cute, sour, cheap little ironies like that. Exacerbating the dark mood, or vice versa, is his anger at Iris. Iris who failed to get any of his Real Time files to the hotel before he left. “You didn’t tell me you changed the name from Reality to Real Time, George,” she blubbered when he woke her up at home in Queens at four-fifteen this morning. “I didn’t find any files labeled Real Time, so I didn’t FedEx any. How was I supposed to know?”

  He finds himself cheered a little as he passes into the San Fernando Valley. Because the Valley is inherently dispiriting, the drizzle and the gray improve it in some relativistic way—the lousy weather and the Valley are in synch on a day such as this. Burbank seems less like a failed paradise manqué, and more like Cleveland.

  Until late 1998 the MBC complex in Burbank had been a rundown Mose Media Holdings greeting-card printing plant and, next door, the low-slung stucco offices of a bankrupt pornographic-video company. With the two dumpy neighbors now joined together by a brand-new seven-story glass silo with open-air walkways, the MBC West Coast headquarters has been transmogrified. A critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote last summer that “the Mose complex looks as if it were built from scratch, not cobbled together from mid-century bits and pieces. It is collage as corporate compound, cleverly mirroring the essence of the feisty ‘New Network for the New Century.’ ” Hank Saddler, as delighted as Mose by the critic’s flattering post hoc concept, started spreading the word that feisty-collage-as-corporate-compound was, of course, precisely Harold’s intention all along.